OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Design-Specific Transformations in Visualization
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

In visualization, the process of transforming raw data into visually comprehensible representations is pivotal. While existing models like the Information Visualization Reference Model describe the data-to-visual mapping process, they often overlook a crucial intermediary step: design-specific transformations. This process, occurring after data transformation but before visual-data mapping, further derives data, such as groupings, layout, and statistics, that are essential to properly render the visualization. In this paper, we advocate for a deeper exploration of design-specific transformations, highlighting their importance in understanding visualization properties, particularly in relation to user tasks. We incorporate design-specific transformations into the Information Visualization Reference Model and propose a new formalism that encompasses the user task as a function over data. The resulting formalism offers three key benefits over existing visualization models: (1) describing task as compositions of functions, (2) enabling analysis of data transformations for visual-data mapping, and (3) empowering reasoning about visualization correctness and effectiveness. We further discuss the potential implications of this model on visualization theory and visualization experiment design.
An Empirical Study of Gendered Stereotypes in Emotional Attributes for Bangla in Multilingual Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The influence of Large Language Models (LLMs) is rapidly growing, automating more jobs over time. Assessing the fairness of LLMs is crucial due to their expanding impact. Studies reveal the reflection of societal norms and biases in LLMs, which creates a risk of propagating societal stereotypes in downstream tasks. Many studies on bias in LLMs focus on gender bias in various NLP applications. However, there's a gap in research on bias in emotional attributes, despite the close societal link between emotion and gender. This gap is even larger for low-resource languages like Bangla. Historically, women are associated with emotions like empathy, fear, and guilt, while men are linked to anger, bravado, and authority. This pattern reflects societal norms in Bangla-speaking regions. We offer the first thorough investigation of gendered emotion attribution in Bangla for both closed and open source LLMs in this work. Our aim is to elucidate the intricate societal relationship between gender and emotion specifically within the context of Bangla. We have been successful in showing the existence of gender bias in the context of emotions in Bangla through analytical methods and also show how emotion attribution changes on the basis of gendered role selection in LLMs. All of our resources including code and data are made publicly available to support future research on Bangla NLP. Warning: This paper contains explicit stereotypical statements that many may find offensive.
A Study of Digital Appliances Accessibility for People with Visual Disabilities
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

This research aims to find where visually impaired users find appliances hard to use and suggest guideline to solve this issue. 181 visually impaired users have been surveyed, and 12 visually impaired users have been selected based on disability cause and classification. In a home-like environment, we had participants perform tasks which were sorted using Hierarchical task analysis on six major home appliances. From this research we found out that home appliances sometimes only provide visual information which causes difficulty in sensory processing. Also, interfaces tactile/auditory feedbacks are the same making it hard for people to recognize which feature is processed. Blind users cannot see the provided information so they rely on long-term memory to use products. This research provides guideline for button, knob and remote control interface for visually impaired users. This information will be helpful for project planners, designers, and developers to create products which are accessible by visually impaired people. Some of the features will be applied to upcoming home appliance products.
Tight bounds for stream decodable error-correcting codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

In order to communicate a message over a noisy channel, a sender (Alice) uses an error-correcting code to encode her message $x$ into a codeword. The receiver (Bob) decodes it correctly whenever there is at most a small constant fraction of adversarial error in the transmitted codeword. This work investigates the setting where Bob is computationally bounded. Specifically, Bob receives the message as a stream and must process it and write $x$ in order to a write-only tape while using low (say polylogarithmic) space. We show three basic results about this setting, which are informally as follows: (1) There is a stream decodable code of near-quadratic length. (2) There is no stream decodable code of sub-quadratic length. (3) If Bob need only compute a private linear function of the input bits, instead of writing them all to the output tape, there is a stream decodable code of near-linear length.
Using Graph Neural Networks and Frequency Domain Data for Automated Operational Modal Analysis of Populations of Structures
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2024
Year: 2024

The Population-Based Structural Health Monitoring (PBSHM) paradigm has recently emerged as a promising approach to enhance data-driven assessment of engineering structures by facilitating transfer learning between structures with some degree of similarity. In this work, we apply this concept to the automated modal identification of structural systems. We introduce a Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based deep learning scheme to identify modal properties, including natural frequencies, damping ratios, and mode shapes of engineering structures based on the Power Spectral Density (PSD) of spatially-sparse vibration measurements. Systematic numerical experiments are conducted to evaluate the proposed model, employing two distinct truss populations that possess similar topological characteristics but varying geometric (size, shape) and material (stiffness) properties. The results demonstrate that, once trained, the proposed GNN-based model can identify modal properties of unseen structures within the same structural population with good efficiency and acceptable accuracy, even in the presence of measurement noise and sparse measurement locations. The GNN-based model exhibits advantages over the classic Frequency Domain Decomposition (FDD) method in terms of identification speed, as well as against an alternate Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) architecture in terms of identification accuracy, rendering this a promising tool for PBSHM purposes.
Not all explicit cues help communicate: Pedestrians' perceptions, fixations, and decisions toward automated vehicles with varied appearance
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Given pedestrians' vulnerability in road traffic, it remains unclear how novel AV appearances will impact pedestrians crossing behaviour. To address this gap, this study pioneers an investigation into the influence of AVs' exterior design, correlated with their kinematics, on pedestrians' road-crossing perception and decision-making. A video-based eye-tracking experimental study was conducted with 61 participants who responded to video stimuli depicting a manipulated vehicle approaching a predefined road-crossing location on an unsignalized, two-way road. The vehicle's kinematic pattern was manipulated into yielding and non-yielding, and its external appearances were varied across five types: with a human driver (as a conventional vehicle), with no driver (as an AV), with text-based identity indications, with roof radar sensors, with dynamic eHMIs adjusted to vehicle kinematics. Participants' perceived clarity, crossing initiation distance (CID), crossing decision time (CDT), and gaze behaviour, during interactions were recorded and reported. The results indicated that AVs' kinematic profiles play a dominant role in pedestrians' road-crossing decisions, supported by their subjective evaluations, CID, CDT, and gaze patterns during interactions. Moreover, the use of clear eHMI, such as dynamic pedestrian icons, reduced pedestrians' visual load, enhanced their perceptual clarity, expedited road-crossing decisions, and thereby improved overall crossing efficiency. However, it was found that both textual identity indications and roof radar sensors have no significant effect on pedestrians' decisions but negatively impact pedestrians' visual attention, as evidenced by heightened fixation counts and prolonged fixation durations, particularly under yielding conditions. Excessive visual and cognitive resource occupation suggests that not all explicit cues facilitate human-vehicle communication.
Robust and Explainable Framework to Address Data Scarcity in Diagnostic Imaging
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Deep learning has significantly advanced automatic medical diagnostics and released the occupation of human resources to reduce clinical pressure, yet the persistent challenge of data scarcity in this area hampers its further improvements and applications. To address this gap, we introduce a novel ensemble framework called `Efficient Transfer and Self-supervised Learning based Ensemble Framework' (ETSEF). ETSEF leverages features from multiple pre-trained deep learning models to efficiently learn powerful representations from a limited number of data samples. To the best of our knowledge, ETSEF is the first strategy that combines two pre-training methodologies (Transfer Learning and Self-supervised Learning) with ensemble learning approaches. Various data enhancement techniques, including data augmentation, feature fusion, feature selection, and decision fusion, have also been deployed to maximise the efficiency and robustness of the ETSEF model. Five independent medical imaging tasks, including endoscopy, breast cancer, monkeypox, brain tumour, and glaucoma detection, were tested to demonstrate ETSEF's effectiveness and robustness. Facing limited sample numbers and challenging medical tasks, ETSEF has proved its effectiveness by improving diagnostics accuracies from 10\% to 13.3\% when compared to strong ensemble baseline models and up to 14.4\% improvements compared with published state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, we emphasise the robustness and trustworthiness of the ETSEF method through various vision-explainable artificial intelligence techniques, including Grad-CAM, SHAP, and t-SNE. Compared to those large-scale deep learning models, ETSEF can be deployed flexibly and maintain superior performance for challenging medical imaging tasks, showing the potential to be applied to more areas that lack training data
A Matter of Mindset? Features and Processes of Newsroom-based Corporate Communication in Times of Artificial Intelligence
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Many companies adopt the corporate newsroom model to streamline their corporate communication. This article addresses why and how corporate newsrooms transform corporate communication following the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. It draws on original data from 13 semi-structured interviews with executive communication experts in large Swiss companies which use corporate newsrooms. Interviews show that corporate newsrooms serve as an organisational (rather than spatial) coordination body for topic-oriented and agile corporate communication. To enable their functionality, it is crucial to find the right balance between optimising and stabilising communication structures. Newsrooms actively adopt AI both to facilitate routine tasks and enable more innovative applications, such as living data archives and channel translations. Interviews also highlight an urgent need for AI regulation for corporate communication. The article's findings provide important insights into the practical challenges and coping strategies for establishing and managing corporate newsrooms and how newsrooms can be transformed by AI.
Collision and Obstacle Avoidance for Industrial Autonomous Vehicles -- Simulation and Experimentation Based on a Cooperative Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

One of the challenges of Industry 4.0, is to determine and optimize the flow of data, products and materials in manufacturing companies. To realize these challenges, many solutions have been defined such as the utilization of automated guided vehicles (AGVs). However, being guided is a handicap for these vehicles to fully meet the requirements of Industry 4.0 in terms of adaptability and flexibility: the autonomy of vehicles cannot be reduced to predetermined trajectories. Therefore, it is necessary to develop their autonomy. This will be possible by designing new generations of industrial autonomous vehicles (IAVs), in the form of intelligent and cooperative autonomous mobile robots.In the field of road transport, research is very active to make the car autonomous. Many algorithms, solving problematic traffic situations similar to those that can occur in an industrial environment, can be transposed in the industrial field and therefore for IAVs. The technologies standardized in dedicated bodies (e.g., ETSI TC ITS), such as those concerning the exchange of messages between vehicles to increase their awareness or their ability to cooperate, can also be transposed to the industrial context. The deployment of intelligent autonomous vehicle fleets raises several challenges: acceptability by employees, vehicle location, traffic fluidity, vehicle perception of changing environments (dynamic), vehicle-infrastructure cooperation, or vehicles heterogeneity. In this context, developing the autonomy of IAVs requires a relevant working method. The identification of reusable or adaptable algorithms to the various problems raised by the increase in the autonomy of IAVs is not sufficient, it is also necessary to be able to model, to simulate, to test and to experiment with the proposed solutions. Simulation is essential since it allows both to adapt and to validate the algorithms, but also to design and to prepare the experiments.To improve the autonomy of a fleet, we consider the approach relying on a collective intelligence to make the behaviours of vehicles adaptive. In this chapter, we will focus on a class of problems faced by IAVs related to collision and obstacle avoidance. Among these problems, we are particularly interested when two vehicles need to cross an intersection at the same time, known as a deadlock situation. But also, when obstacles are present in the aisles and need to be avoided by the vehicles safely.
Certified Continual Learning for Neural Network Regression
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

On the one hand, there has been considerable progress on neural network verification in recent years, which makes certifying neural networks a possibility. On the other hand, neural networks in practice are often re-trained over time to cope with new data distribution or for solving different tasks (a.k.a. continual learning). Once re-trained, the verified correctness of the neural network is likely broken, particularly in the presence of the phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting. In this work, we propose an approach called certified continual learning which improves existing continual learning methods by preserving, as long as possible, the established correctness properties of a verified network. Our approach is evaluated with multiple neural networks and on two different continual learning methods. The results show that our approach is efficient and the trained models preserve their certified correctness and often maintain high utility.
Consistent Document-Level Relation Extraction via Counterfactuals
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Many datasets have been developed to train and evaluate document-level relation extraction (RE) models. Most of these are constructed using real-world data. It has been shown that RE models trained on real-world data suffer from factual biases. To evaluate and address this issue, we present CovEReD, a counterfactual data generation approach for document-level relation extraction datasets using entity replacement. We first demonstrate that models trained on factual data exhibit inconsistent behavior: while they accurately extract triples from factual data, they fail to extract the same triples after counterfactual modification. This inconsistency suggests that models trained on factual data rely on spurious signals such as specific entities and external knowledge $\unicode{x2013}$ rather than on the input context $\unicode{x2013}$ to extract triples. We show that by generating document-level counterfactual data with CovEReD and training models on them, consistency is maintained with minimal impact on RE performance. We release our CovEReD pipeline as well as Re-DocRED-CF, a dataset of counterfactual RE documents, to assist in evaluating and addressing inconsistency in document-level RE.
Exploring Unstructured Environments using Minimal Sensing on Cooperative Nano-Drones
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advances have improved autonomous navigation and mapping under payload constraints, but current multi-robot inspection algorithms are unsuitable for nano-drones due to their need for heavy sensors and high computational resources. To address these challenges, we introduce ExploreBug, a novel hybrid frontier range bug algorithm designed to handle limited sensing capabilities for a swarm of nano-drones. This system includes three primary components: a mapping subsystem, an exploration subsystem, and a navigation subsystem. Additionally, an intra-swarm collision avoidance system is integrated to prevent collisions between drones. We validate the efficacy of our approach through extensive simulations and real-world exploration experiments involving up to seven drones in simulations and three in real-world settings, across various obstacle configurations and with a maximum navigation speed of 0.75 m/s. Our tests demonstrate that the algorithm efficiently completes exploration tasks, even with minimal sensing, across different swarm sizes and obstacle densities. Furthermore, our frontier allocation heuristic ensures an equal distribution of explored areas and paths traveled by each drone in the swarm. We publicly release the source code of the proposed system to foster further developments in mapping and exploration using autonomous nano drones.
Improving the Transferability of Adversarial Examples by Feature Augmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Despite the success of input transformation-based attacks on boosting adversarial transferability, the performance is unsatisfying due to the ignorance of the discrepancy across models. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective feature augmentation attack (FAUG) method, which improves adversarial transferability without introducing extra computation costs. Specifically, we inject the random noise into the intermediate features of the model to enlarge the diversity of the attack gradient, thereby mitigating the risk of overfitting to the specific model and notably amplifying adversarial transferability. Moreover, our method can be combined with existing gradient attacks to augment their performance further. Extensive experiments conducted on the ImageNet dataset across CNN and transformer models corroborate the efficacy of our method, e.g., we achieve improvement of +26.22% and +5.57% on input transformation-based attacks and combination methods, respectively.
Analyzing the Effectiveness of Listwise Reranking with Positional Invariance on Temporal Generalizability
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

This working note outlines our participation in the retrieval task at CLEF 2024. We highlight the considerable gap between studying retrieval performance on static knowledge documents and understanding performance in real-world environments. Therefore, Addressing these discrepancies and measuring the temporal persistence of IR systems is crucial. By investigating the LongEval benchmark, specifically designed for such dynamic environments, our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of a listwise reranking approach, which proficiently handles inaccuracies induced by temporal distribution shifts. Among listwise rerankers, our findings show that ListT5, which effectively mitigates the positional bias problem by adopting the Fusion-in-Decoder architecture, is especially effective, and more so, as temporal drift increases, on the test-long subset.
The Cost of Executing Business Processes on Next-Generation Blockchains: The Case of Algorand
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Process (or workflow) execution on blockchain suffers from limited scalability; specifically, costs in the form of transactions fees are a major limitation for employing traditional public blockchain platforms in practice. Research, so far, has mainly focused on exploring first (Bitcoin) and second-generation (e.g., Ethereum) blockchains for business process enactment. However, since then, novel blockchain systems have been introduced - aimed at tackling many of the problems of previous-generation blockchains. We study such a system, Algorand, from a process execution perspective. Algorand promises low transaction fees and fast finality. However, Algorand's cost structure differs greatly from previous generation blockchains, rendering earlier cost models for blockchain-based process execution non-applicable. We discuss and contrast Algorand's novel cost structure with Ethereum's well-known cost model. To study the impact for process execution, we present a compiler for BPMN Choreographies, with an intermediary layer, which can support multi-platform output, and provide a translation to TEAL contracts, the smart contract language of Algorand. We compare the cost of executing processes on Algorand to previous work as well as traditional cloud computing. In short: they allow vast cost benefits. However, we note a multitude of future research challenges that remain in investigating and comparing such results.
Failure Transparency in Stateful Dataflow Systems (Technical Report)
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2024
Year: 2024

Failure transparency enables users to reason about distributed systems at a higher level of abstraction, where complex failure-handling logic is hidden. This is especially true for stateful dataflow systems, which are the backbone of many cloud applications. In particular, this paper focuses on proving failure transparency in Apache Flink, a popular stateful dataflow system. Even though failure transparency is a critical aspect of Apache Flink, to date it has not been formally proven. Showing that the failure transparency mechanism is correct, however, is challenging due to the complexity of the mechanism itself. Nevertheless, this complexity can be effectively hidden behind a failure transparent programming interface. To show that Apache Flink is failure transparent, we model it in small-step operational semantics. Next, we provide a novel definition of failure transparency based on observational explainability, a concept which relates executions according to their observations. Finally, we provide a formal proof of failure transparency for the implementation model; i.e., we prove that the failure-free model correctly abstracts from the failure-related details of the implementation model. We also show liveness of the implementation model under a fair execution assumption. These results are a first step towards a verified stack for stateful dataflow systems.